ABSTRACT
Human newborn infants are evolutionarily predisposed to communicate. Caretakers may interpret their signals, more or less correctly, as meaningful and intentional. Reliable responsiveness is the essence of the attachment system; appropriate and prompt responses to instant's' signals support secure quality of attachment. Other signals, if sensitively responded to, support curiosity for the world. From birth onward infants experience and learn whether their signals will be answered, and in what way, by whom, and when, thereby developing into their own culture. Videos from seven cultures, presented here, demonstrate the ubiquity of maternal responsiveness. They present a solid basis for future data from cultural and from biological anthropology. Carefully videotaped observations elucidate differences in meaning and function of sensitive caregiver-infant interactions for the emotional and cultural development of children in various cultures.
Subject(s)
Mother-Child Relations , Object Attachment , Child , Child, Preschool , Emotions , Humans , Infant , Infant, Newborn , LearningABSTRACT
The most relevant functions of an attachment figure for a child from evolutionary, cultural, and individual perspectives are being a safe haven and secure base for the child. The concepts of behavioral systems and emotional security are delineated. Central to a child's emotional security is her smooth transition between seeking a safe haven when distressed and a secure base when at ease with her attachment figures. The special quality of the child-father attachment relationship is marked by an emphasis on supporting the child's exploration and her emotional intensity during agitated play. Systematic analysis of child-father attachment requires careful, realistic, and lengthy natural, ethological observations of behaviors that indicate the child's attachment to father. Such observations would result in a fuller understanding of the infants' or children's contribution to their development of psychological security.
Subject(s)
Emotions , Father-Child Relations , Fathers/psychology , Object Attachment , Behavior , Child , Child Development , Child, Preschool , Humans , Infant , Infant, Newborn , Parenting , ResearchABSTRACT
This article describes the earliest processes involved in socializing infants into cultural beings, that are thought to set the stage for the type of interactions described in this special issue. From birth onwards, infants experience and learn whether their signals will be answered, and in what way, by whom, and when. Infants learn about their own culture from the persons around them through the meaning and interpretations these persons give to their behaviors. Many questions remain about how these processes link to infant brain development, and how insights from cultural and biological anthropology can be used to elucidate the meaning and function of sensitive caregiver-infant interactions.
Subject(s)
Emotions , Maternal Behavior , Mother-Child Relations , Female , History, 20th Century , Humans , Observational Studies as TopicABSTRACT
Attachment is a biological propensity of primate infants to form close protective relationships with their mothers. In humans it is the special relationship in which the organization of emotions, empathy and knowledge about oneself and others is combined and represented in inner working models. For this, it is innate to human nature to form joint attention structures in which language develops for learning individual and particularly emotional and cultural meanings by narrative interpretations of various experiences. These processes are essential for the development of human beings. Joint attention is initially and primarily formed between infants and attachment persons. Fathers in particular can be additional supportive attachment persons, as well as teachers, grandmothers etc. Sensitivity to infants' attachment needs is the key to understanding the development of secure or insecure attachment strategies. These strategies highly influence the development of psychological security in mature and adaptive, or psychological insecurity in less mature and less flexibly adapted adolescents and adults.
Subject(s)
Adaptation, Psychological , Object Attachment , Reactive Attachment Disorder/psychology , Social Adjustment , Adolescent , Adult , Child , Child, Preschool , Humans , Infant , Psychotherapy , Reactive Attachment Disorder/diagnosis , Reactive Attachment Disorder/therapyABSTRACT
This study aimed to investigate the relationship between attachment state of mind and perceptual processing of social and non-social, affective, and neutral material. A total of 57 young adults completed the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI) plus an experimental task in which their perceptual thresholds to different types of pictures were assessed. Significant correlations were found between the AAI dimensions and perceptual thresholds for social stimuli such as social interactions or human faces displaying emotional expressions. As expected, no relationships were found between the AAI and perception of neutral stimuli. The pattern of correlations was especially clear for the dismissing dimension. The results suggest that higher vigilance to social stimuli is related to dismissing attachment tendencies and, to a milder degree, to preoccupied tendencies.
Subject(s)
Conditioning, Operant , Emotions , Facial Expression , Perception , Adult , Female , Humans , Male , Mental Processes , Social PerceptionABSTRACT
OBJECTIVE: During the Holocaust, extreme trauma was inflicted on children who experienced it. Two questions were central to the current investigation. First, do survivors of the Holocaust still show marks of their traumatic experiences, even after more than 50 years? Second, was the trauma passed on to the next generation? METHOD: Careful matching of Holocaust survivors and comparison subjects was employed to form a research study design with three generations, including 98 families with a grandmother, a mother, and an infant, who engaged in attachment- and trauma-related interviews, questionnaires, and observational procedures. RESULTS: Holocaust survivors (now grandmothers) showed more signs of traumatic stress and more often lack of resolution of trauma than comparison subjects, but they were not impaired in general adaptation. Also, the traumatic effects did not appear to transmit across generations. CONCLUSIONS: Holocaust survivors may have been able to protect their daughters from their war experiences, although they themselves still suffer from the effects of the Holocaust.
